Remittances and the Rural Household
1972, a rural household in a labour-sending area of Southern Africa. Nine people live in the homestead. The eldest son is on a 12-month mine contract paying 30 rand a month; he remits 12 rand a month, but recruitment cost 5 rand and his return fare is unpaid until the contract ends. He is away for 11 months. His wife and two sisters cultivate two hectares of maize; yields have fallen from eight bags to four since the 1960s. A bag of maize costs 3 rand at the store. The household also pays 4 rand in school fees and 6 rand in tax. The alternative is for him to stay and work three months locally at 8 rand a month, helping with ploughing.
1. Using the figures, assess whether the migrant wage improves household welfare. What else must be known?
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Start with the arithmetic, then state what it cannot capture.
Migrating: 12 rand × 12 = 144 rand remitted a year, less 5 rand recruitment, plus an unpaid return fare. Staying: 8 rand × 3 = 24 rand, plus his labour at ploughing and harvest.
The cash gap is very large - roughly 120 rand - so on any income measure the migrant option wins. But the maize figures complicate it. A fall from eight bags to four leaves a four-bag deficit, costing 12 rand to fill at the store, and that fall may partly result from the loss of a ploughman in the planting season.
What else is needed: whether the 12 rand arrives every month or only in some months; whether the yield fall is caused by drought or soil exhaustion rather than absent labour; whether the wife controls the remittance; and whether the 6 rand tax and 4 rand fees are paid from the remittance or from cattle sales.
The judgement therefore depends on the criterion chosen: cash income, nutrition, or the wife's autonomy.
2. Oral testimony from the household says 'migration ruined us', while a government report says migration 'brought prosperity to the reserves'. Which is more reliable?
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The question is badly framed: they are reliable for different claims.
Oral testimony is authoritative for experience, household strategy, and remembered loss - how remittances were spent, who left, who stayed, what the absence meant. But it is retrospective, spoken to a particular interviewer, and shaped by later disappointment; the wife, the son and the headman would give different accounts of the same year.
The government report is authoritative for aggregates - wage flows, recruitment volumes, taxable income - but its category of 'prosperity' may count only cash entering the reserve, ignoring food security, health and the labour burden on women.
Both statements can be true at once: the household may be richer in cash and poorer in food and in labour. A historian should use the oral testimony to explain the household and the report to explain the system, and should notice that the report's purpose was administrative - to show that the reserves could support themselves while supplying labour.
3. The government wants to reduce migration by settling families near the mines. Using this case, what would you predict about the effects?
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The household data point to both gains and losses, and the balance depends on which costs migration was covering.
Gains: the 5 rand recruitment fee and return fare disappear; the son is present for ploughing, which may recover some of the lost maize; the wife is not managing remittances at a distance.
Losses: the 12 rand monthly remittance becomes a daily or weekly wage spent in a town where rent, water and food must be bought - the four-bag deficit of 12 rand might become a much larger cash food bill. The wife and sisters lose access to two hectares unless land is provided, and the household loses the safety margin of a rural base to return to if wages stop.
The prediction should be conditional, not confident: settlement improves welfare where plots and gardens are provided and wages are stable, and worsens it where they are not. The case warns against treating the wage as the only variable; it is the combination of cash income, food production and who controls the money that determines the outcome.